The Cavalier, Vol. 4, No. 3

A mounted knight in blue armor towers above a gathered crowd, lance raised toward a distant castle. The Cavalier was among the most popular pulp magazines of the early 1900s, competing directly with All-Story and other adventure weeklies that sold for ten cents a copy. Published by Frank A. Munsey, it mixed historical romance, swashbuckling adventure, and exotic tales across hundreds of pages of tightly-set text. The hand-painted cover art—dramatic, saturated in color, often heroic in scale—functioned as the primary sales vehicle. Readers chose their magazines almost entirely by cover image before opening them to discover the actual contents within.